Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch died Friday from congestive heart failure. / Seth Wenig, AP

by Martha T. Moore
USA Today, USA TODAY

by Martha T. Moore
USA Today, USA TODAY

NEW YORK - His casket carried by police officers to the strains of New York, New York and the applause of thousands, former New York mayor Ed Koch was memorialized Monday by former president Bill Clinton as a man with "a big brain but ... a bigger heart."

"We're doing a lot better because you lived and served," Clinton said.

Koch's service drew a full complement of New York politicos: mayors, governors, senators and congressmen past, present and likely future. "Everyone is here " Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in his eulogy. Koch "has got to be loving all this attention."

The crowd for his funeral filled the 2,500-seat Temple Emanu-El on 5th Avenue, where Koch's plain wooden casket was flanked by an honor guard from police, fire and other agencies.

Koch, who died Friday at 88, was "as genuine a politician as America has ever seen," Bloomberg said, praising his "intelligence, his honesty and his independence,"

Born in the Bronx, Koch led New York from 1978 to 1989, when the city was recovering from a fiscal crisis that led to near-bankruptcy. Koch cut costs, balanced the city budget and got the subway system to scrub iconic but rampant graffiti off its cars.

"He restored the arc of our city's history," Bloomberg said. "Thanks to him we became great again."

Koch's catchphrase - "How'm I doing?" - drew an appreciative response from those who liked his success in building affordable housing, halting the decline of the city's parks and outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The answer was less enthusiastic from those who wondered why corruption flourished in city agencies and borough political organizations and why the mayor did not respond more strongly to the emergence of AIDS. Some of the city's ugliest racial incidents, including the death of a young black man chased by white youths onto a highway in Howard Beach, Queens, occurred on his watch.

A three-term Democrat, Koch was defeated in a primary in 1989 by David Dinkins, who became the city's first African-American mayor. Koch stayed involved in the life of the city and in politics: He crossed party lines to endorse Republican mayoral candidates Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. (Bloomberg is now an independent.) He wrote columns and movie reviews and provided political commentary on local television. In his remembrance, Clinton held up a sheaf of letters Koch had written him during his presidency.

When the city named the Queensboro bridge after Koch in 2011, he stood by the on-ramp and waved at approaching cars, crying, "Welcome to my bridge!" Though he initially was playing to video cameras, Bloomberg said, Koch continued long after the cameras were turned off.

It was characteristic of his style that in a video he made to be played after his death by The New York Times, his first words were "Do you miss me?"

Koch, who ran for governor in 1982 but lost in a primary partly because he could not stop himself from making cracks about upstate "hicks," made sure he would never miss New York. Though Jewish, he is to be buried today in a plot he purchased in Trinity Church cemetery, the only graveyard in Manhattan where he could find space.

"A Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican neighborhood," Bloomberg said. "What could be more New York?"